Your image may be in exhibit that pushes boundaries of Web privacy

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New York • Image after image splashes on the wall of the art exhibit  a snapshot of young people laughing and drinking, a picture of an elephant, an exposed belly of a woman barely covering her breasts with one arm. The photos were taken from their computers without their knowledge through a technological glitch.

Visitors can sort through Facebook profile photos from unwitting users through a website that organizes them by gender, country and adjectives such as "sly," ''smug" or "easygoing." Think online dating site, for people who don't know they are on it.

The works are part of "The Public Private," an art exhibit that explores the gray areas of online privacy, surveillance and data collection in the age of Facebook and Google. The pieces shift across the boundaries between what's public and private, all through the lens of technology.

Its curator, Christiane Paul, says she hopes visitors will walk away with questions. The exhibit's goal, she says, isn't to universally declare Facebook bad or social media evil but to get people thinking. It's only been nine years, after all, since Facebook's birth and seven since Twitter was created, so art that explores social networking as a subject is just emerging.

"I don't think good art provides easy answers," says Paul, adjunct curator at Whitney Museum of American Art and a media-studies professor at The New School, where the exhibit runs through April 17.

ARTICLE PHOTO GALLERY

Indeed, bringing the concept of online privacy into the physical world can feel both uncomfortable and eye-opening. The Internet may lull us into a false sense of security. Posting something on Facebook, for instance, can feel more private than shouting it on a busy street, even if the opposite is true given that a Facebook post might reach hundreds or thousands of people, perhaps millions.

"We are living, really, in a situation where we don't know what we want to have as public," says Paolo Cirio, one of the artists featured. "We don't know what is public and what is not. It's a moment of confusion for a lot of people. The next generation already has another idea for privacy."

Cirio's "Street Ghosts" project is nothing more than life-sized images of people caught in Google's street-level mapping feature, plastered on walls and fences in the same physical place that their digital counterparts occupy on Google Maps. Some of the images are pasted on the outside walls of the building housing the exhibit.

They serve as a reminder of what we leave behind on the Internet.

"We lose control [of our digital information] completely when we die," he says, "but it's left in the archives of Google, Facebook."

Some of the works in the show, Paul acknowledges, exist in a legal and ethical gray area.

For "The Others," Eva and Franco Mattes gained access to private computer files through "old software that lets you anonymously share files from your computer," Eva Mattes explains. "But people who are not familiar with it mistakenly share their whole computer without realizing it."

Looking inside a stranger's computer feels a bit like peeking into his or her house, she says.

The artists say they didn't feel conflicted about grabbing the photos from private computers.

"The first thing I noticed is how little difference there is with the ones you see online all the time," Franco Mattes says. "These are supposedly private photos, but they're no different than public photos. In a sense, I'm doing what all photographers do: I 'take' photos."

So has anyone in the photos contacted them?

"The first time we showed the work, in Sheffield, U.K., a person claimed to be portrayed," Eva Mattes says in an email interview. "The next day he came back to see the exhibition with his whole family, to show them he was famous."

Another gray-area piece, Cirio's "Face-to-Facebook," has been taken offline after Facebook's lawyers complained. But visitors can use a computer at the exhibit to look through the piece. Cease-and-desist letters from Facebook are posted on an adjacent wall.

The project, created in 2011, consists of data that hundreds of thousands of Facebook users shared on the site publicly  including their name, profile photo, the country they live in and groups they belonged to. Cirio and co-creator Alessandro Ludovico put all the information in a database and used face-recognition software to put people in personality categories such as "funny," ''climber" and "smug." Then, the artists set up a dating website using the photos and information. It was called Lovely Faces, but it didn't last long. Facebook sent its first cease-and-desist letter in February 2011. The artists eventually took the site offline.

"Although it was online only five days, a lot of people understood that what they publish on Facebook eventually could be used by someone else without their authorization," Cirio says. "They lose control of their data." 

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